Innkeeper's Song

LAL

“Downstream.”

“How can you know?” I bent my head a second time to the river water cupped in my hands. I made a bit of a spectacle out of it, more than a bit, letting the water trickle over my lips and throat and smiling lingeringly as I sipped it. Finally I said, “Human life leaves a taste. In the air, in the water, in the ground. One house—not a village, only a single house, with a few people, an animal or two, coming and going, fishing, eating, using the river—it changes the flavor. It just does.” I sampled the water once more and nodded. “There’s no one living anywhere upstream. Try it, you can tell.”

Nyateneri said thoughtfully, “How nice to hear the most ridiculous statement of my entire life while I am still young enough to appreciate it.” He crouched beside me, scooped up a few drops, licked at them impatiently and stood up at once, looking abruptly angry and embarrassed. Only when we were well into the mountains had he let his woman’s form dissolve again, showing himself lean and gray; heavy-boned, yet more graceful than he should be for his size, the hair as ragged as ever (he chopped it periodically into the same scorched-earth monastery cut, for no reason that he would ever tell), and the eyes still as slowly changeable as twilight skies. A gentle mouth still, in a hard, tired face.

“This is stupid,” he said. “I know all the stories, I am quite ready to believe that Lal-Alone can give a lizard two weeks’ start and track it across any desert you like, blindfolded if you like. But one fisherman pissing out of a skiff—no, no, I am sorry, I spent my youth in a cloister, my trustfulness is not what it should be. No.”

Well, it served me right for making such a grand show of my skills. “No rapids further up, either—no taste of white water at all.” Nyateneri snorted. I wiped my hands on my breeks and pointed to the sky as I stood up myself. “Very well, consider our friends there. Name them for me. If you like.”

Nyateneri gave the black-and-white birds circling just upstream of us a brief glance, and answered, “Vrajis. In the south we call them priest-catchers. Why?”

I said, “Because even in your country it is surely known that these birds do not nest where men are. If there were a settlement within fifty miles, you wouldn’t see a vraji here until the village had been ashes for fifty years. Tell me I am mistaken.”

No chance of that, anyway—there must be jokes and proverbs in a hundred tongues about the vrajis’ antipathy to human beings. One of my own folk’s nastier religions is based upon it. Nyateneri sighed, rubbed his neck, stared at the birds, walked away from me, walked back, rubbed his neck again and said, “So. Not one house.” It was not exactly an agreement, but it was not a question either.

“You really can tell by the taste,” I said. “It doesn’t take as much practice as you might think.” Nyateneri had wandered off again, morosely studying the stony, sloping quarter-moon of shore where we stood, and the dark trees beyond. I raised my voice slightly. “The real question is not where Arshadin’s house is, but how distant it is, and how we plan to get there. Having completely exhausted my legendary woodcraft, I would welcome any suggestions.”

When Nyateneri finally turned to me and spoke, my blood stopped moving for a moment, because he spoke in Dirvic. That tongue has been dead for five centuries, which is not nearly long enough. I have met three people who knew Dirvic, including the one who taught it to me, and each came to an uncommonly evil end. How Nyateneri learned it, and how he guessed that I knew it, I still do not want to discover. He said, “My first suggestion would be that we speak this terrible language from now on. Can you bear it?”

The sudden kindness of the question made my eyes sting, which angered me. “I will bear it,” I said. Dirvic hurts the mouth and coats the throat with a thick bitterness. It was never meant for ordinary conversation. Nyateneri said, “There was one man at the monastery who spoke it, but he died. I am betting our lives that there are no others. Now. Since you have obviously been nursing a plan of attack since we set out, it is pointlessly polite of you to ask for my own ideas. Tell me how you propose to build the boat.”

“A raft would be more like it,” I said. Even putting that simple a sentence together in Dirvic, meaning seemed to slough away from the words like burned skin. I went on, “I am no boatwright, even if we had the time and the tools. But I have made rafts out of less than this, and sailed them, too.” I gestured at the trees—a type of thin-barked conifer I had never encountered before—and at the luxuriant blue vines enlacing most of them. “You and I could have a serviceable raft together by sundown. We might even manage a keel, the way they do in the O’anenue Islands. I’ve seen that done, long ago.”

But Nyateneri was shaking his head slowly. “Not with these trees.” His expression was more gentle than mocking, even a bit sad. “There is no reason for you to know them, but in the north country where I was born we call them jaranas—jokers, joker-trees. They look like softwoods, but they’re so dense that they’ll drag the teeth out of any saw but the best Camlann work. And a raft made of joker-tree logs would sink before you had time to get aboard. I could have told you, if you had let me know your plan.”

There was no triumph in his face, but in Dirvic everything sounds like a whining sneer. My turn now to look away, to pace silently back and forth, chewing one side of my tongue (a childhood habit) and feeling like an imbecile. It is true, what my friend said—I hate not knowing everything, even when it is not possible. More important, I had left myself with no back door, nothing in reserve in case it proved that I didn’t know everything. Even a ground-hare, a kumbii, knows better than that—in his world, just as in mine, carelessness is another name for Uncle Death, and I had been calling that name far too often lately. So I walked in circles and stared up at those useless trees until Nyateneri spoke again.

Dirvic affects the voice in strange ways: it made me sound as young as Lukassa, and brought Nyateneri’s tone and pitch back almost to what it had been when I had thought of him as a woman. He said, “You are forgetting our faithful companion.”

“Likely that’s the only thing I haven’t forgotten,” I said sharply. “Why else would we be fouling our mouths with this vile talk but for him in the shadows? What about him, then?”

Nyateneri said, “I think he should help us with our boat. It seems only fair, when you think about it.”

I looked at him so long that he finally began to smile, trying earnestly to smother it, I suppose to keep the man watching us from suspecting anything he didn’t suspect already. “Lal, I do not expect him to make one for us, no more than we could ourselves. He is no wizard, only a carefully trained murderer, but the heart of that training has to do with being very well prepared for the unexpected. And if the unexpected should include a journey by water, he will be ready.” He put a hand on my shoul-der, and once again I almost jumped and snapped at the kindness of it. He said, “It is an old intimacy.” Dirvic has no such word; I had to guess at his meaning. “I know these men as you know your dreams.”

I stared at him a moment longer, and then burst out in loud laughter, gesturing my derisive rejection of his suggestion as broadly as I could. Pushing his hand from me and turning away, I said over my shoulder, “We will have to make him believe that we have set off downriver. That will not be easy.”

Nyateneri shook his fist, shouting after me, “No, it will not be. Go sulk over there and think about it for a while.”

So I did that. I walked off down the riverbank until I came to a low flat boulder, and there I sat with my knees drawn up to my chin, and I brooded as visibly as I could manage. And back in the middle of the quarter-moon, where we had tethered our horses and dropped our dwindling supplies, Nyateneri did the same thing, now and then shouting bits of classical northern poetry in impromptu Dirvic translation at me, accompanied by particularly threatening grimaces, which I did not deign to acknowledge. However the man may end, he was born to travel with a troupe of players, such as those sleeping in Karsh’s stable when we first arrived at The Gaff and Slasher. I have mentioned it to him since.

We kept this up for some two hours, while the matronly Susathi slid by us, making no sound, and barely a ripple to blink in the sunlight. It was a dangerously peaceful place: no matter how urgently I set about the problem of getting away from it, no matter how furiously I bent my senses to catching the least rustle of breath or blood or footstep, the instant I allowed myself a breath for myself, then the soft, humming warmth had me again. I did not doze, exactly; but just once, when a fish jumped in midstream, I found myself on my feet, sword fully drawn, crying something in that language I no longer speak. I think I was calling to Bismaya.

Toward evening, we began to move slowly and sullenly together, not shouting now, but speaking in a grumbling manner which Dirvic made suitably menacing. Almost simultaneously, almost in the same words, we said, “First of all, it must seem to be one of us, not both.” We could not help laughing truly then, but that was all right, because of what laughter sounds like in Dirvic. Nyateneri said, “The question is whether we fight or merely separate. I do think a fight would be nice.”

“If you and I fought, someone would die. Quite probably the two of us. He knows that.”

“Not a proper fight, just a sort of scuffle. Harsh words, cuffs, pushes—lovers irked beyond endurance. That’s what he thinks we are, after all.”

He was mocking me now: that was clear enough, even through the impersonal malevolence of the language. I did not answer, but regarded him levelly up and down, making it plain in my turn that I was remembering the taste of his skin, and the rake of his nails down my sides, and the flowering leap of him inside me. Remembering everything, without regret and without longing. I said, “I will have to strike off upstream, leaving you here. You must appear to be building a raft alone.”

“It will have to be a trash raft—driftwood, dead branches, whatever litter I can find. That’s the part that worries me, making the thing look like something that such a wily fugitive as Soukyan might sensibly try to ride downriver—let alone take over a rapids. Intimacy again, you see.”

The deliberate use of his true name jarred me silent for a moment. I had only spoken it once since learning it, and I made quite sure never to think of him as anything but Nyateneri. “Wait until twilight, and stay well clear of the trees. How near can he possibly come without your seeing him?” Nyateneri gave me a tolerant glance which would have enraged Queen Vakalshakva the Unspeakably Good, who—as the tales have it—was of so benevolent a temper that savage rock-targs and nishori left their lairs to make pilgrimage to her court, lie at her feet, and ask blessing. They soiled the carpets and ate the servants—who, if not as saintly as she, were at least tasty—but Vakalshakva patiently replaced both and never rebuked them. I know eight songs about her, none written by either rock-targs or servants.

I nodded slightly to a coil of tawny water-weed spinning slowly in a little eddy near the bank. “Gather as much of those dead-man’s-ringlets as you can. The stalks end in clumps of air-bladders, and you could very well be fixing them under the raft for buoyancy. They might even work.”

“So they might,” Nyateneri said in a vicious Dirvic snarl, not looking in that direction. “Thank you, that’s a clever idea.” The words came out sounding like a blood insult, and he punched my shoulder abruptly, knocking me backward into a crackling tangle of brush, then laughing uproariously as I struggled to pick myself up. I said, “I’ll leave your pack with all the rope in it,” and hit him in the mouth.

“Leave the empty water-bottles as well,” he reminded me, shaking me until my teeth clicked together. “Anything that floats. Circle back after dark, without the horses.”

So we agreed on details, such as they were, all the while slapping and knocking each other up and down the shore. Our beasts looked on, nickering unconcernedly, and fish continued jumping after insects; and somewhere close among the joker-trees Nyateneri’s tireless enemy waited for nightfall. When all was as settled between us as it could be, I spat in his eye and stormed away, pausing only to shout back at him, “I’m very sorry that I didn’t tell you my plan about building a raft. I am still Lal-Alone, and confiding even in a partner is hard for me. I am sorry.”

Nyateneri bared his teeth and lifted a threatening hand. “I understand. I should tell you, incidentally, that I cannot swim.” I almost ended our charade right there, gaping at him in deepening alarm, but he growled, “Confidence for confidence. On your way, and remember that you have never in your life met anyone as dangerous as our little friend. Go now!”

I stalked back to the horses and began furiously loading them, making a point of throwing Nyateneri’s pack to the ground when I hitched his horse to the Mildasi black. Then I mounted and set off, heading upstream, due west, not a backward glance until we were rounding the upper horn of the quarter-moon. Nyateneri looked small and distant already, bending to pick up an armload of the thick, rubbery dead-man’s-ringlets. I called, “Be careful!” trusting that evil language to make the warning into a parting curse. Nyateneri never raised his head. I spat again, this time, to rid my mouth of the shame of Dirvic, and rode on along the river shore.